Antler opens its office in Berlin to strengthen the local start-up ecosystem, promising pre-seed investment at unprecedented scale.Partners of the fund covering Germany and Central Europe are Alan Poensgen and Dr. Christoph Klink.

A typical pre-seed to seed fundraising process consists of the following steps: defining fundraising targets & timing, mapping target investors & fundraising materials, having first intros and coffee meetings, pitching to multiple investors, and finally, negotiating and signing.

Antler US portfolio company Casting Depot, the professional network for media and entertainment, is emerging as the industry's premier marketplace for all facets of the talent booking process. Co-founders Lacey Kaelani and Brad Larson have led Casting Depot through a 446% month over month increase in talent user growth. The Casting Depot team is working with Antler to drive user traction and refine their product offering as they field casting calls from industry players like Netflix, HBOMax, Twitch, Bumble, Verizon, and MTV.

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Antler portfolio company Caria is the first AI-powered platform for women in menopause. To celebrate World Menopause day, they introduced Caria Premium Memberships last week. Co-founders Arfa Rehman and Scott Gorman collaborated with the Antler US team to build and refine this membership and launch several new features, which include a new digital behavioral health program and more advanced health tracking.

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In this episode, we speak to Anurag Srivastava, serial entrepreneur and founding partner of Jungle Ventures, Southeast Asia's largest independent venture capital firm. Over the last two decades, Anurag has played a crucial role in building and scaling companies in the tech and startup ecosystem Globally. Some of the companies in Jungle's portfolio include hotel booking platform, RedDoorz; cloud-based software provider, Deskera; interior home design platform, Livspace, and Thai fashion e-commerce startup, Pomelo Fashion.

We received 2600 applications for our second UK cohort, which was a 50% increase from the previous cohort. 71 founders were selected to join Antler, half of whom had previously launched a startup. After two months, we invested in seven startups which were built by these entrepreneurs. In keeping with our focus on supporting companies with diverse co-founding teams, over half of the companies that we invested in (four out of seven) had at least one woman founder, which is significantly above the London average of 21%.

In this episode we speak to Nir Eyal, a lecturer, consultant, and best-selling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches Behavioral Design, which is an intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He is also an active investor in habit-forming technology companies. Some of his recent investments include Kahoot!, Eventbrite, Anchor.fm, and Product Hunt. In our latest episode, Nir talks about his "Hook Model" to increase customer engagement, the internal trigger required to make your product a habitual one and how to plan your time to get the most of it without getting distracted.

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After interviewing hundreds of founders and working with dozens of teams to build and grow their startups from scratch, Antler Partner Winnie Khoo shares some insights on her experiences and doles out some advice to aspiring founders.

London
August 10 2020

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Watch the video to get to know the team behind BrightBee - an Antler-backed AdTech startup that continuously explores the best audience to fully optimize social media ads using Machine Learning.

These six Antler-backed companies are now ready to tackle some of society’s toughest challenges through innovations such as revenue-based financing for SaaS startups, autonomous robots that handle meticulous farming tasks and software that maximizes the returns of building sites.

Due to the growing interest in responsible investment and therefore from VCs, the industry will need to become familiar with the concept of ESG. ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance which are a set of criteria used to measure an investment’s sustainability and societal impact.

Here at Antler, we are on a mission to fundamentally improve the world by enabling the world's most exceptional people to build the sector-defining companies of tomorrow. Here is our take on ESG from the VC perspective.

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In this episode, we speak to Helen Wong, a partner at Qiming Venture Partners, about the fascination with social commerce, different cultural mindsets of founders, and the differences in China and Southeast Asia's tech ecosystems. Helen is a veteran in the VC industry, ranked among the top 100 VCs and top 25 female VCs in China in 2018 by Forbes. She has led investments into Akulaku, a new Southeast Asia finance platform, and Jingling Group, a Chinese social E-commerce platform, and was also involved in the investment into Alibaba.